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The summer sports are coming to an end. All that is left is the end to the Formula One season. NASCAR crowned their 2023 champion last night. Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney won his first Cup Championship at Phoenix Raceway, by finishing second. All he had to do was finish ahead of the other three still alive for the championship – Christopher Bell, Kyle Larson and William Byron. Bell went out early when he blew a brake rotor and crashed on Lap 108. Ross Chastain won the race, but Blaney won the championship by finishing ahead of Larson (third) and Byron (fourth). It was a nice exclamation point to a long season.

The World Series concluded last week. I’m still not a fan of November baseball, but at least it only crept one day into the month of Thanksgiving. The Texas Rangers won their first World Series in franchise history. I’m happy about that because they are a good franchise that has been close, but never could close the deal. Not everyone is happy, however. Many fans feel like the new playoff format dilutes the regular season so much, that they feel it rewards mediocrity and it encourages teams to come out of nowhere and be crowned champion.

I’m old enough that I remember when the second version of the Washington Senators relocated to Dallas in 1971 and became the Texas Rangers. I’m also old enough to remember when there were no divisions whatsoever in baseball, just two leagues – the American and National Leagues. There were no divisional playoffs. The team with the best regular season record in each league automatically went straight to the World Series. There were no other teams involved, nor were there any other playoffs. When the two leagues split into and Eastern and Western Division in 1969, everyone screamed how the new playoff format was diluting the World Series.

Personally, I no longer care what playoff format Major League Baseball uses. At one time, I followed baseball almost as closely as I follow football. Both sets of grandparents were staunch St. Louis Cardinals fans. Every summer night, they would sit and listen to each pitch over the radio to the dulcet tones of Harry Carey. I remember being in fifth grade, packing my father’s Zenith transistor radio in by book bag for school. I rigged up the wiring for the ear-piece to run up the back of the chair and hide it away in my ear. In the afternoon hours of school, I listened to the Cardinals lose to the Detroit Tigers in seven games in the World Series. Although my team lost, that memory of listening to day baseball in school was golden.

More than a quarter-century later, a baseball strike wiped out the 1994 World Series. The strike lasted into the beginning of the 1995 season. I never purposely boycotted, I just had lost interest in the sport. My interest waned over the next few years, until it reached a point where I hardly watched baseball at all. This season, I watched bits of about five regular-season games and not one pitch of the playoffs or World Series. It’s a shame, considering how much I followed baseball – especially in the 70s and 80s. Anyway, I digress…

When NASCAR first went to their Chase format in 2004, racing purists screamed about how this was no way to crown a champion. Unlike when the baseball purists were screaming about diluting the World Series, I agreed with the purists regarding the NASCAR Chase for the Championship. Ten years later, they expanded the Chase to sixteen drivers and re-branded their Chase format as the NASCAR Playoffs.

To me, this sounded absurd. No other sport had all the other season-long participants playing along during the playoffs. A driver that is thirtieth in points can still steal a win during the NASCAR Playoffs. Chastain won last night’s race, even though he had already been eliminated.

NASCAR is loaded with gimmicks, with the Playoffs just being one of many. IndyCar flirted heavily with NASCAR’s dreaded Green-White-Checker (GWC) rule at last May’s Indianapolis 500. Many fans are in favor of IndyCar adopting the GWC rule. I’m not. Not as many, but some fans think that the NTT IndyCar Series should institute something that mimics NASCAR Playoff format. I disagree with that also.

Think about it. When you use the NASCAR proportions of drivers and races; IndyCar would have roughly ten drivers qualify for a Playoff format over the final five races of the season. This past season, that would be Nashville, IMS Road Course, Gateway, Portland and Laguna Seca. That would be a street course that provides random finishes, three natural terrain road courses and an oval. As each race is completed two drivers would be eliminated, until we get down to the final two at Laguna Seca, which provided a lot of randomness this season.

The argument for a racing playoff system is that it adds excitement at the end of the season. I will be the first to admit that the last five races of this past IndyCar season held little drama, as Alex Palou ran away with the championship and clinched it before the transporters even arrived at Laguna Seca. Alex Palou finished seventh at Gateway, with two races to go.

Under the NASCAR format, that may have been enough to eliminate Palou. Regardless of what you think of Palou or Chip Ganassi, is it really fair to eliminate your best team and driver that dominated the season, simply due to a gimmicky new format? Some will say he knew the rules, but I would think that would be a huge injustice to Palou or any other driver in the position.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like keeping the championship simple. If you score more points than anyone else throughout the season, you win the championship. There is no changing the rules in the last five races, just to keep fans engaged. If fans can’t stay engaged over a seventeen-race season, maybe they had better find a sport that requires a far-shorter attention span.

The NFL keeps tweaking its playoff format. I remember when each conference was divided into three divisions. They took each divisional winner and then the team that had the best overall record without winning their division, as a wildcard. That created a four-team playoff in each conference to determine who went to the Super Bowl. These days fourteen teams vie for the right to go to the Super Bowl. That’s why teams with losing records make it into the playoffs, which should never happen in any sport. I feel like if a team has a losing record, they should forfeit their playoff spot to a team with a better record – even if they win their division. Losing-record teams in any playoff system is the ultimate definition of a diluted playoff.

I don’t think the powers-that-be with IndyCar are considering a playoff-type format at this time. It does not seem to have increased any new interest in NASCAR, but it has alienated and driven away some of their core fan-base. Let’s hope IndyCar never jumps into that diluted pool.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on November 6, 2023 at 4:02 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.